Dogfight: MH17 and the conspiracies that shot it down

Damien Murphy

Part of the sad epitaph of Malaysia Airlines MH17 is a tragic tableau where conspiracies, propaganda, ideology and madness intersect to feed off one another.

The Russians joined the feast on Tuesday when their man in eastern Ukraine Alexander Borodai declared that everything alleged on the internet was lies.

He vehemently rejected the veracity of tweets and mobile phone conversations between his officers that flashed around the world in the hours after the aircraft fell out of the sky on Thursday and instead sheeted responsibility onto the insurgents.

In a CNN interview, Mr Borodai rolled his eyes at the naivete of questions and incautiously compared the MH17 disaster zone to ‘‘black humour’’.

The self-styled prime minister of the Donetsk people's republic, Mr Borodai denied possession of a Buk surface-to-air missile system that many claimed was supplied to his rebels by the Russians and therefore was proof of culpability.

“We didn’t have any motives to target these planes," he said. "But for Ukraine, our enemy, the crash of this plane is very beneficial.”

Advertisement

Meanwhile in Moscow, Lieutenant-General Andrei Kartopolov claimed the Malaysian plane strayed north of its planned route, adding that a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet, typically equipped with air-to-air missiles, had been recorded in the proximity of the Boeing 777.

He challenged the US to release its satellite images to back up its claims rebels targeted the Boeing 777 with a missile.

"An altitude gain was recorded for a Ukrainian armed forces plane," he said. "Its distance from the Malaysian Boeing was three to five kilometres. With what aim was a military plane flying along a civilian aviation route practically at the same time and at the same flight level as a passenger liner?"

The US and other nations blamed the rebels for shooting down the plane and demanded Russia take responsibility.

After Lieutenant-General Kartopolov’s comments, Channel One Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States’ biggest television network, reported the CIA was behind the attack and claimed the agency planned to take an airliner out of the sky during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Conspiracy theories grow like weeds in the wake of tragedy: there are websites in Sydney carrying claims that Malaysia Airlines MH370 was shot down in March because it approached the US military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

After Thursday's crash, news that some passengers were en route to Melbourne to attend an HIV/AIDS conference prompted theories that the plane had been shot down to cover up the man-made origins of the disease.

A centuries-old satanic cult, the Illuminati, bent on world domination and with an obsession with the number seven was blamed: MH17 was a Boeing 777 that first flew on July 17, 1997 and had been in service for 17 years.

Whatever happened in the skies above Ukraine, the subsequence has re-enforced Aeschylus’s adage that truth is the first casualty of war.